Media recording devices such as Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) and Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) are very popular for recording television programs to an integrated or external storage device. A PVR or DVR is attached to a monitor or television set and receives broadcast signals through a coaxial cable, satellite dish, or antenna. A PVR or DVR can also be integrated within a television set. Once the video stream from a provider reaches a cable box and is decrypted into a video format (if required), the broadcast content is able to be recorded by the PVR or DVR. When the recording device is programmed to record a video stream, the recording device saves the content as a video file on the storage device. Additionally, the recording device indexes data to indicate where the file is located, and metadata that consists of the specific information relating to the recorded content. The indexed content is then available for a user to watch at their leisure.
However, PVRs and/or DVRs are limited by the capacity of storage devices associated with the corresponding PVR and/or DVR. Users who have a limited time to watch recorded programs, or record a lot of content, are continually notified that the storage device is running out of storage space. The limited amount of storage in the storage device burdens the user with quickly deciding which existing content to delete in order to create space to record further content. Situations like this lead to a large portion of the storage device to be utilized for content that is never viewed by the user.
At the present time, some known ways of dealing with limited storage capacity are content compression and streaming content. Compressing the content means more content can be stored. However, the storage device will still eventually run out of space. Streaming content from the provider or the internet means that there is no content stored locally on a storage device. When streaming content, the user has to remember to watch the program before it becomes unavailable. Also, the bandwidth of the network used to stream the content may limit the viewing quality of the streaming content or cause the content to pause intermittently, or buffer, while the remainder of the content is being downloaded.